Your own giant flashlightSpireworks let's you control two giant antenna located in NYC Midtown. By using a website you can choose the light of the antenas for two minutes, separately, and pick colors and effects. How to get it? It's by invitation only ;-)

Given that I'm having troubles finding the right time to write posts, I decided to do small posts from time to time. I came up with this fashion way of calling it "snippets of the week".

Micosoft Edge

I was at a friend's house and instead of using my favorite browser I decided to try Edge, the latest web browser from Microsoft. First of all, I'm not a pro Apple/Microsoft/etc fan, I consider myself really open and unbiased, and I didn't like it.

The visual interface seem to be the same for touch-enabled laptops as well as those that are not. This makes the buttons really big for non-touch computers. Also the dropdown menues are really big and take a lot of space while displaying just some few options. Maybe in the future all the devices will converge to tactile, but for now this is not the case. So, in my opinion, having a 13 inches laptop with this big buttons it's not optimal,

The default homepage is confusing. Lots of information is shown: bookmarks, recent sites, top sites, and lots of feed news that apparently are automatically adjusted to the user habits. After asking my friend, he told me never uses it and finds the content irrelevant.

As an advanced user, it was really hard for me to find the right place where settings are supposed to be. I didn't find it natural.

Finally, I don't think Microsoft is doing a fair game regarding the search engines that can be configured as default for the address bar. After finding the right place where this came be tweaked, the options displayed include Facebook, YouTube and some other. I was sad to discover Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and even Google were missing. I mean, come on, who uses YouTube or Facebook as their default search engine? Unbelievable.

As for rounding up my conclusions, I think it's a nice browser for an entry level user. Someone who never browsed the web before. But arguably the overloaded default homepage and the lack of an easy to show bookmarks bar complicates things a lot.
For medium expertise and advanced users, it's no go.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Today all of a sudden I realized my phone ran out of battery in less than 5 hours.

I opened the battery consumption and found out that the top consumer was Lyft; this was shocking as I hadn't been using it the whole day. Digging into the issue, the statistics have shown that Lyft app consumed 336 MB of RAM (on avg) in the last 3 hours. This is huge! Especially if compared to the other apps sitting on my phone:

RAM in last

3 hours

Battery

consumption

Lyft

336 MB

19%

Whatsapp

51 MB

3%

Snapchat

16 MB

0%

Google Maps

0 MB

0%

Uber

0 MB

0%

Was it a glitch?

A priori we can’t tell. But it seems quite unlikely. Why? The last update of Lyft app’s latest update was on Jan 25, 2017. That’s exactly one week ago. If there was such a failure introduced by accident, they should have had catch it in QA. Lyft, a billion dollar company with tens of millions of users, is likely to have a really intensive QA procedure. Especially if we consider that they only have one product on the market (their mobile app). Also, they are likely to collect both statistics and usage. But this was not enough during a seven day period of time to catch the bug, which doesn’t really make sense.Can the user do something about this?

Yes and no. If the app is bad or evil (where bad means not well developed and evil means developed to obtain something from the user) the phone’s owner can’t do much about it. Uninstalling might be a possibility, but considering that, sometimes, Lyft has better fares than Uber, it’s good to keep it handy.

Can we protect our privacy?

Yes! Android and iPhones allow controlling what is shared with the App developer. If you go to: Android: Settings -> Apps -> tap on ‘Lyft’ -> tap on permissions iPhone: Settings -> Scroll down and tap on ‘Lyft’ -> tap on permissionsAfterwards you can disable what is shared with the app. I would suggest disabling everything for now. But remember, the next time you need to book a ride you will have to re-enable the permissions.

The app from Uber is pretty humble on this, I always had used it with only permissions for Camera, Location and Phone.

I am not aware of what are the minimum permissions Lyft need to run, you can experiment on disabling some and try to request a ride.

But also, this is a tricky topic: some companies develop their apps in a really poor way, requiring the user to enable all the permissions in order to use their app. This is mainly because of two possibilities reasons:

The development team want’s to save time, so they just ask for permissions once, and the whole app relies that they will be granted.

The development team is evil, and wants to collect extra data from you while they give you this amazing app for free. This is the case for example of several free video games. They require permission to read your contacts, calendar, or SMS. But why? They don't need them.

Disabling permissions will not save us of the app consuming an insanely amount of battery, but will limit the damage the app can do to us.Finally, we can limit the background internet usage (google for ‘how to limit background data’ for Android or iPhone). Again, try to disable it and request a ride. Maybe the app will not work properly, so experiment by yourself. Optionally, you can enable background data for Lyft only while you are about to use the app.

Are you telling me that Lyft is a super evil megacorp?

No, not necessarily. Maybe it was just a series of unfortunate events.

How so?
Maybe they are experimenting with new features in their app and something went wrong. I guess that they might try to get information about your movement, maybe if you are commuting home via car or public transport, and to try to guess how the traffic is like. Why am I saying this? Well, I noticed the big chunk of battery consumption comes from CPU, but not that much from RAM. Also, the internet background usage was not really high (15 MB). So whatever they had been doing, it was expensive on resources but not on network.

Fabricio PH

About Me

Optimistic, analytical, proactive, flexible, results-oriented, with very good handling of interpersonal relationships, strong dedication to teamwork, as well as great interest in learning, teaching and the Social Good.

Willing to do an MBA in the upcoming years and gain experience in management.